What kind of requirements information is of interest to NERSC?
NERSC and DOE want to collect information regarding computing, storage, networking, visualization and support needs. There are two ways to look at the issue. One is to answer the question “what level of NERSC facilities and support are required to carry out your scientific goals in the next 3-5 years?” The other is to consider what additional science you would do if you were given an allocation 10x, 100x, and 1000x larger than today (using today’s ERCAP award as reference). We are interested in algorithmic-level information because it helps NERSC understand what kind of computer architectures and which key system attributes might best serve the science. We are interested in such characteristics as typical problem sizes and processor counts, memory needs, data migration needs, storage needs and the like. Another important dimension for today’s computer systems is parallelism – how the simulation codes express it and science features enhance or limit it. Still another dimension is how si
